Record keeping and information flow don’t sound like the reasons you joined the board. You joined to make the big picture stuff happen. But, without the basic framework for board governance records in place, you definitely lose time looking for stuff. Time that would be better spent on the stuff you really want to do in the first place.
Values for Board Members
Board members are “the fiduciaries who steer the organization towards a sustainable future by adopting sound, ethical, and legal governance and financial management policies, as well as by making sure the nonprofit has adequate resources to advance its mission.” Keeping accurate board records and decisions documentation are of primary importance to protect the board when compliance matters or other potential liabilities are involved.
Values for You
Maybe your personal role serving this nonprofit or social enterprise board may not involve shepherding and maintaining board records and information assets. But if no one takes this role on, the absence of records or the presence of blocks to quick access will cost you time, decrease your efficiency. You’ll be able to demonstrate your own effectiveness in less time if you can get to what you need to know to do your work faster.
Values for Your Donors
Efficiency is at the core of operations of nonprofit or social enterprise organizations. Stakeholders and donors expect grantees to organize themselves well and to do their work as effectively as possible. Most nonprofit board directors consider efficiency to be a key factor of meetings and will hold themselves to the same expectations. Streamline the way your board spurs measurable capabilities and impact when you remove these pain points for operations.
Values for Board Candidates
If you are on the fence about joining in or saying no thanks to a board opportunity, due diligence on your part is a good idea. Is this body scrambling around, unsure of operations processes like this? Do new members have the chance to on-board with direct access to expertise and the history of how decisions were made? Are current members available to engage with you to share and discuss tacit or explicit knowledge continuity to inform next steps person-to-person? Are board records and committee decisions in order in the event of an audit? If the answers to these questions come up no, it may not be the right fit for you.
Hidden Values
Successful implementations of records management and information flow to boards and stakeholders ideally turn out to seamless and unnoticed. That’s by design. We tend not to stress over things that are working well. And we shouldn’t have to stress about these basics that give us so much value for our core endeavors.
Convening the special combination of vision, responsibility, engagement and action is fundamental to nonprofit or social enterprise governance and impact successes. Knowsaic provides practices, standards and processes to free your board members to enable real engagement. Now you can re-focus board energies and expertise on cohesive actions aligned to mission strategies.
Talk to Knowsaic today to realize greater values for operations, information flow and collaboration spaces that work for you.
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